On Week 21
skyjake:
danij:
- Work continued on fixing the multiplayer. I managed to address two issues: player attack animation (broken in all games), and the behavior of the Heretic Morph Ovum. In the case of the attack animation, the problem was that the server was not sending all the state changes to the client. Apparently the original reason was to reduce the amount of transferred data, but in this case the implementation was resulting in an obvious malfunction, so the check was removed. At the moment the server will send mobj state changes to the clients when they are not part of the normal state animation sequence. With the Morph Ovum the problem was twofold: on serverside the players' class was not changed to Chicken, which meant that when the player attacked the mobj changed to the normal Corvus attack sequence. On clientside the psprites were never updated to reflect the Chicken class.
- Also, there was some activity related to project infrastructure. As described in the previous post, the dengDevs blog was transitioned to Archive mode. The other change was that old builds (12+ weeks) will start getting purged from the builds repository. However, the build tags remain in the Git repository even after being purged, so each build can still be accessed (albeit only manually from source).
- Unless I spot more issues with Heretic, I will shift my focus to Hexen where I believe there are quite a number of things broken. IIRC, Hexen was never fully updated during the last round of netgame related changes -- fortunately most of the required solutions already exist in the other two games.
danij:
- Continued work on game side UI systems. This week was mostly spent refactoring UI displays into widgets. All the simple value/icon displays as well as the chat and message log are now native UI widgets. There is still much to be done to these however I'm deferring the next "abstract-or-generalize" pass until all the displays have been turned into widgets.
- The next would-be UI widget on the operating table is the automap. I do not foresee any major issues in the refactoring.